Intel Tanglewood to Be 10 Times Faster Than Madison.

Quite a lot of interesting facts were said during Windows Server 2003 launch last week. As we revealed yesterday, Dell demonstrated its first Itanium 2-based server during the event and now this web-site added that Intel’s Paul Otellini shared some information about future Itanium processors and their performance.

According to the executive from Intel Corporation, code-named Montecito processor, Intel’s first dual-core chip, that is due in 2005, will be two or three times faster than today’s Madison CPUs coming out later this year. Furthermore, the Tanglewood processor available in 2006 or 2007 will already be ten times faster compared to this year’s most powerful IA64 processor. In fact, Otellini did not said that this would be code-named Tanglewood, but referred to it as “future Itanium” processor, but everybody got the idea right.

We do not know much about Tanglewood CPU at the moment. Based on preliminary details issued by an unofficial source we can figure out that Tanglewood processor will have more than two cores on the chip and will be able to offer even more performance than the predecessor. Keeping in mind that such microprocessor will reportedly consume less energy than Montecito, we can assume that they will be made using thinner technology, presumably 65nm; expect higher frequencies in this case.

Unfortunately, as I already said, there are very few details about IA64 processors that will emerge in 3 or 4 years from now and we cannot tell you what will actually make possible such a huge performance leap. Since large caches always boost performance of server applications, we should see huge speed bump because of the fact that Tanglewood’s L3 will be more than 18MB provided by Montecito. Moreover, with 4 or more cores on one CPU, we should expect another huge performance advantage over the present generation devices. I also expect Intel to implement a kind of advanced HyperThreading technology into future-generations IA64 chips, as a result, their speed will increase even more. To sum everything up we can really expect Tanglewood processor with 4 or more cores, high core-clocks, large L3 caches and possible architectural improvements to be really fast and even outperform the Madison by a factor of ten.